Having successfully mastered the art of the Peugeot driving - honestly, it wasn't the various gears per se, I did learn to drive that way, not on automatic, I am that old; it was the secret of the reverse! - I was set to chauffeur my mother around the island. Well, we planned various tours, and on Tuesday, we did the first. Which led us to
(
Read more... )
"Pragmatic" is not a word I'd use for WWI era Robert Graves, is all. (Nor the later one, actually, though he was trying then - but any man who has the kind of crazy personal life he had during the 20s is seriously lacking in pragmatism.) For starters, he was as shell-shocked as Sassoon and Owen, though managed to keep himself out of a hospital. (In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.) Also, leave it to R.G. to think saying "I have hallucinations, too" makes him a credible witness when testifying for Sassoon. But Barker needed someone to play the "now do be sensible, Siegfried, we're not going to change anything anyway" role, and she didn't need another soldier-poet in an intense relationship with Sasson, hence the basically two Graves scenes we get and their content.
Reply
Nope. *puts on list* I believe to remember reading that she used to call Chopin her wife, more or less jokingly, but I may have made that up. They must have been quite an interesting pair, though.
ut Barker needed someone to play the "now do be sensible, Siegfried, we're not going to change anything anyway" role, and she didn't need another soldier-poet in an intense relationship with Sasson, hence the basically two Graves scenes we get and their content.
I confess that I interpreted these entirely different, namely as Graves being concerned about his friend and thus doing everything to get him into a hospital instead of prison...now, I'm also someone who doesn't think pragmatism is bad, so it could just be my interpretation merrily overriding authorial intend to my heart's delight. So far I also have the feeling that Prior is more of a main character than either Sassoon or Owen, but that might of course change.
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment